Love Ramen
by Simple-Minded Idiot
Summary: While Teuchi and Ayame were on a vaction, Naruto found his greatest enemy and the biggest insult to ramen. Topless ramen in all its beauty... Instant packet ramen.


**Just a little something I had to get out of my system. Apparently, this was something that I figured out around yesterday. And, yes, I'm purposely mocking myself by using "Love" in some of the titles of the stories I make.**

**Edited the day after the posting. Thanks to Kaikouken for finding the whole "plot" thing... which was actually "plop." **

* * *

Team 7 was a genin team where one could see the three different partitions of society. The different castes of society. 

Haruno Sakura, the only girl of the group, had working parents. She was well-off. For short, she was in the middle-class. She could afford all of her needs and she lived a relatively comfortable life (in her house).

Uchiha Sasuke, the only Uchiha in Konoha, had no parents that worked but he did have rich parents. And rich relatives. Which led to him being unbelievably rich. He was the only Uchiha – Itachi obviously didn't count any more after that stunt he pulled back then – who could inherit the treasures of his family. He could afford all of his needs and wants but he just didn't choose to buy anything unnecessary because he was quiet the pocket-pincher.

Uzumaki Naruto, the only ninja that wore orange, had no parents like Sasuke. He never had any parents. He was an orphan from the start. He had never been rich, too. This meant that he was poor. In fact, he just relied on Iruka to provide him with the bare essentials. Oh, and there were also the people from Ichiraku. Old man Teuchi and his daughter, Ayame.

Currently, Teuchi and Ayame were on a vacation. That meant that Ichiraku was closed and Naruto would not be getting his fill of good, home-cooked – well, with his frequent visits, he might as well call the Ichiraku Ramen stand as his second home – ramen. None of the other ramen stands or restaurants treated him as well as those two. If he did set foot on one of those establishments, they would quickly close. He didn't know why they did it, but they did.

So Naruto resorted to supermarkets. At least those didn't close down immediately. Most likely because they had other patrons.

While he was walking in what he liked to call as the noodle aisle, he found an odd form of ramen. It was new. The only kind of ramen he knew that the supermarkets sold were instant cup ramen. But this kind of ramen wasn't in a Styrofoam or plastic cup. It was in a plastic packet. Packet ramen? It looked interesting so Naruto took a few of them. Besides, they would be good for saving storage space.

Poor Naruto. He was totally oblivious to the horrors that his ramen-obsessed self would soon see.

* * *

Naruto was excited. He had read the directions on how to _cook _this kind of ramen. It seemed quite interesting. He opened the ramen packet and took out the much smaller (and shinier) packet that was inside of it. He opened the shiny packet and poured its contents on the boiling water. Its contents – some sort of powdery concoction; though he wasn't quite sure if concoction was the word he was looking for – soon spread over the water. 

Then he put the noodles on the boiling water. The compressed and hard ramen noddles arrived on the pot-of-sorts with a satisfying plop. Naruto placed a lid on the pot and left the noodles to... er... expand and look more like regular ramen noodles. He really was excited. He wondered what sort of ramen it would look like. The packet said that they would be of that tonkatsu flavor. Naruto didn't even _know_ that there was tonkatsu-flavored ramen!

He was now in la-la-land. He was dreaming of what his ramen would look like. There would be some sort of tonkatsu floating on top of the ramen and, of course, a naruto.

Naruto knew that a naruto was the heart of a ramen. It just wouldn't be _ramen_ without a naruto decorating its top. Well, at least that was what he thought.

Really, if only he knew what instant packet ramen looked like at the end of the whole boiling process.

* * *

Naruto stared at the ramen. At _his_ ramen. Was that _thing_ even ramen? Well, okay, so maybe he was overreacting but... but... that ramen was a disgrace to all ramen! His virgin eyes – only with ramen-related stuff, of course – were now forever tainted. He had just chanced upon a topless ramen. A ramen without any toppings. 

At first he had thought that if he had waited a bit, maybe a topping would rise from the soup and the noodles, but after two minutes of hoping, he gave up. No topping took that long to rise from the depths of the bowl. Even he could be a realist sometimes.

It was said that it was the soup that really made the ramen of different restaurants... well... different from each other. But what if there was only soup on the ramen and nothing else? That was unheard of. It was preposterous. It had to be breaking at least one universal rule. It had to be a sin.

Unfortunately, a lot of people sinned quite frequently nowadays. Though that didn't at all help the situation at hand.

But since this _was_ ramen, he decided to give it a chance and found out that, no, he shouldn't have given this atrocity a second chance and, yes, he should've just flushed the thing down his toilet or threw it on the sink.

Instant packet ramen was obviously something that he wouldn't be picking up from the supermarket for a very long time. In fact, he wouldn't be doing that for the rest of his life. It wasn't everyday that anyone could manufacture something so horrible. Something unthinkable. It wasn't everyday that Naruto came across something that bastardized the good name of ramen.

Naruto had learned several important things that day. One being that cup ramen was the best kind of ramen he could ever hope to afford in supermarkets and that when Ichiraku opened again, he would eat until his stomach burst. Not literally, of course. Sakura would never love him if he had a nonexistent stomach.

* * *

When Ichiraku opened two days later, Teuchi wasn't surprised that Naruto was his first customer. Although the boy seemed to be happier than beyond belief, almost as if he had just found his lifesaver (it was almost as if the kid had starved himself), when his first bowl of miso ramen was placed in front of him by Ayame.

* * *

**Thank you for taking the time out of your busy life to read this. No, really, thank you. Because even I don't think that this ramen rambling deserves to be read.**

**Though if you are interested, I'm planning on making something that has Sasuke, Neji, tomatoes, riceballs, and lame name puns (seiyuus are not spared).**

**Comments will be much appreciated. Please do point out any mistakes that you've found.**


End file.
